


In Cars

by OccasionallyCreative



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bar/Pub, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Awkward Ben Solo, Awkward Flirting, Bar Room Brawl, Cities, F/M, Implied/Referenced Sex, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-30 09:11:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15748650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OccasionallyCreative/pseuds/OccasionallyCreative
Summary: After a fight breaks out at his bar, First Order, grumpy hipster Ben Solo finds himself stuck in a car with a bleeding Finn Tyrell, his girlfriend Rose Tico and the bruised Rey Niima. The last of whom he last saw two months ago, running out of his flat in the morning with nothing but a goodbye thrown over her shoulder as she went.Maybe tonight will be a second chance for them?





	In Cars

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Reylo AU Week, Day 1: Modern.
> 
> Posting initially without an edit, because I live on the edge.

The first thing Kylo does when he folds himself into the car is switch off the radio. Phasma’s wild blonde fringe flops over her forehead. Her blue eyes glare.

“Asshole,” she mutters, turning the ignition and grinding the car into gear. Kylo glowers, winding down the passenger window. Summer’s gripped the city and refuses to let go. The local morning news weatherman can’t stop crowing about it.

“AC/DC is overrated,” he says, snatching a bottle of water from the glove compartment. The water’s tepid and it stings his throat.

“I’d rather listen to Back in Black than whatever you have hidden away in your pile of vinyl,” Phasma scoffs. She switches the radio back on. Screaming guitar thrums through the seats. Her car stinks harshly of old cigarettes and coffee. “You’re working the bar with me for first half tonight,” she continues. “Second half, when the crowds are in, we’ll bring in the new guys.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?”

She shrugs. “They want to know how to work a bar, they need to work a bar.”

Ambulance sirens speed past them. Ben watches them disappear up a side street.

Even in the suburbs, Coruscant is a busy city.

Tell the truth, Coruscant is noise, personified. Put a Coruscant native in the middle of a field, his father would say, and they wouldn’t be able to tell if it was day or night or their arse from their elbow.

From ever since he can remember, Ben’s noticed how Coruscant relies on noise to fill its narrow streets. It’s all infrastructure upon infrastructure, buildings layered on top of other buildings, new developments barely allowed to be new before they’re being torn down to make way for the next big idea.

Phasma takes a left turn into the one-way system.

The one-way system is the ‘underworld’. It’s a twisty half-world between the noise of the inner city and the gated prime of the suburbs, and it’s suffered the most. Barely two blocks long, its new developments rot and every buzzword hated by every politician thrives.

“God,” Phasma scoffs. She came from here, she admitted that once when she got just on the wrong side of drunk. She turns left, and the city gleams ahead of them in the evening sky like a star.

Pumped fresh with money, it still beats.

Apartments are filled to the brim with middle-class families who watch, goggle-eyed, boxes of blue and white.

Office blocks still glow yellow, multiple colleagues staying late. Shops attracting last-minute customers still shine fluorescent white.

Phasma joins the traffic of the main road, travelling deeper into the city. Street lights flit overhead, and the car rattles through, past the yellow and white.

Phasma strikes a vivid contrast to the city. She’s smooth lines where Coruscant’s all jagged pieces of confused architecture.

Everything about her is painstakingly arranged into a facade of ease. Her black t-shirt hangs neatly around her long neck, the logo of the First Order splashed across her back. Her short sleeves are rolled up, with a pack of cigarettes tucked inside the fold. The hem’s tucked into blue washed roll-up jeans that remind Ben of the 90s.

“How many have we got in for tonight?”

“Full house,” Phasma replies. “Rock bands bring in the numbers.”

Just as First Order didn't go for the grungy rips in the uniform of other start-ups, they didn’t go for the neon flashing signs of other bars on the street. It stood instead nestled among them, relying on silver metal that shone white, pink, yellow and blue reflections instead, dazzling passers-by and drawing them closer.

It’d been good enough for his grandfather when he’d owned the place.

 _“Your grandfather damn near ran this place into the ground.”_ Ben blinked at the memory. At once his father was in front of him, wiping down the wooden bar he called ‘old girl’, and talking idly about her history.

 _“It’s not that much of a surprise. He was just young, wife and two kids – he bowed to pressure, chose the wrong investors.”_ His father smiled, pressing the keys to the place into Ben’s hand.

The keys that are tucked now in his pocket. Sliding his hand into his pocket, Ben feels the weight of the memory in his palm while Coruscant crawls past.

 _“We built this thing up from nothing Ben. That’s why your mom and I waited to give it to you.”_ His grip lingered on the keyring emblazoned with the logo of Alliance, what his father had made the place into while his mother went off to Hosnia, sinking herself into politics. His father’s smile was lopsided. At the time, Ben had thought he might say something, a word of encouragement—his father left instead, the neon sign of the Alliance flickering orange over his departing form.

Ben had taken the sign down on his first day on the job.

“Who’s the band?” he asks, shaking the memory away and wiping sweat from his neck.

Phasma sighs, reaching behind to open her storage. She throws an elastic band at him, and he catches it in his palm.

“Praetorian,” she answers, changing down a gear as the traffic around them builds up. The heat of the cars, their engines rumbling, joins the morning heat overhead.

Ben frowns, pulling back his hair into a knot at the back of his head.

“Them?”

“Yup. They have a new manager now. Much calmer.” She smirks. “For a metal band.”

Phasma eyes him.

“You’re fidgeting. Are you hoping that girl will turn up again?”

“Not likely,” Ben replies off-handedly, briefly closing his eyes at Phasma’s scoff, and fixes it with a, “I don’t really care.”

He doesn’t. She’d taken one look at him, leaving him too much room to remember the exact shade of her eyes, and fled his house, throwing sorry over her shoulder.

The silence grows bigger, Phasma focusing on the road, but slowly, the heat growing at his ears and threatening to creep onto his cheeks down his neck isn’t from the sun.

He turns up the radio.

* * *

Rey wrinkles her nose at the name when Finn says the name.

“What, like those ancient Roman guards?”

Finn shrugs. “Rock bands have weird names, Peanut.”

His car is ramshackle but cosy. A few bottles of water here, dog hair there. As if on cue, Drew (full name: Droid) leaps up from his bundle of blankets, barking. Sitting on the backseat with the pup, Rose giggles and lets him lick her cheek before she tries to settle him.

“Oh gosh you’re so cute—” she says, and Rey exchanges a look with Finn, but he’s too busy glancing in the rear-view mirror and smiling at his girlfriend. Rey looks over her shoulder, to see Rose cupping Drew’s cheeks and shaking his head from side to side. “I’m so going to hate it when Poe gets back.”

“It’s just until Poe gets back from Russia, babe,” Finn reminds her. Rose whines, as Drew sniffles.

“I suppose I won’t miss vacuuming dog hair out from strange places,” she says, idly brushing her thumb over the crown of Drew’s head. The park hoves into view as they turn a corner, so Finn parks up. He turns in his seat, his eyes travelling between the pup and Rose.

“I can get someone to cover me to take the dog home once you’re finished,” he offers, but Rose is already shaking her head.

“Finn, our apartment is literally five minutes away, I could’ve walked here in the first place.”

Finn fidgets in his seat, his attention flickering to the bump of her belly. “But I—”

Something appears in Rose’s eyes. She smiles and leans forward, drawing him into a quick, tender kiss. “I’ll come to find you at the bar. I’ve got the money for the subway. Don’t worry about me, okay?”

Rose gathers up Drew’s lead, at which he barks brightly. Shushing him quickly, Rose pushes open the door and throws a “good luck at your interview Rey” back, along with a wink.

Rey buries her head in her hands.

“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” she grumbles. Finn laughs.

“When did I say anything?”

“True,” Rey sighs, lying back in the car seat, pulling the sleeves of her sweater over her knuckles. Jakku was blistering in its heat; Coruscant’s sun is weak in comparison.

Finn is one hundred percent correct. It wasn’t his fault.

Plutt was the one who had been making her pull more hours, for less and less pay, and when he’d made her miss Finn’s graduation from the community college, she’d been the one who’d snapped.

Finn joked when she stormed into his and Rose’s apartment later that night, jobless and spitting blood, that she was the only person who could quit her job by throwing a wrench over the head of her boss.

Since then, she’s managed to find some low-paying work at another mechanic’s, but Maz works for pittance herself, doing consistent small jobs that help the needy rather than the indulgent customizers, who think improvement comes in making things bigger, lower, louder.

Rey idly does the calculations on her phone while they’re stuck at the lights. It comes up with the same numbers, and she groans.

“Tell me he won’t just go on and on about fucking coconut water this time,” she says, closing her eyes.

_Sunlight, pouring in through wide windows and over exposed brick. A guy beside her who made her chest tighten in a way that terrified her, and led to her, as his eyes snapped open and caught hers, to running out of the flat with her shoelaces untied and knickers in her jeans pocket._

 “Hipster prick,” she adds, mumbling.

Finn laughs and taps her knee.

“He’ll probably just go on about the place’s history. How it formed ‘part of the cultural landscape’,” he says.

“It’s only been going 3 years.”

“As First Order. Apparently, it was called, uh, Resistance, Rebellion before? Something like that.” Finn clicks his fingers, remembering. “Alliance. Yeah, that’s it.”

Rey’s eyes widen. She straightens up, staring hard at Finn’s profile.

“Shut up.”

“Huh?”

“Shut up.”

“Rey, what—?”

“Alliance?!” Her voice stratospheres into a squeak. She practically bounces in the passenger seat as she grasps her phone, tapping at the keyboard and scrolling until she finds it. “It was! Holy shit!”

“Jesus – what, did someone die there?”

“No! No – no – Alliance! Run by Han Solo and Leia Organa – the very place where David Bowie wrote _Rebel Rebel_ in the bathroom!”

“Oh!” Finn frowned. “Okay. Uh, cool, I guess.”

“Better than cool. Oh, God.  _That_  Alliance is now ‘First Order’?” Run by a prick who talked about nothing but coconut water.

A prick with soft eyes.

A prick who gave her possibly the best orgasm of her life.

A prick who she was now going to have to ask to give her a second job.

Finn laughed, reading her expression.

“It’s not that bad, Peanut. Cheer yourself up – listen to some Bowie.”

“Not funny Finn.”

* * *

The Tico girl practically rips off the passenger door of the Falcon, diving into the back of the car.

“That’s—” Ben tries, but she glares.

“My boyfriend has got a bleeding nose, _I don’t care about your car_ ,” she spits. Finn is beside her, tilting forward with a thick wad of tissues pressed to his nose. Blood marks his cheeks and his lip.

The front passenger door opens, and the girl ( _The_ Girl, his brain unhelpfully reminds him) slides in beside him. Ben, his fingers on the ignition, blinks, staring her up and down.

She’s got a mark on her cheek that’ll bruise if he doesn’t get ice on it soon.

“Hi,” he says dumbly, his voice deep and lumpen when she looks at him.

She blinks. “What?”

Ben clears his throat. “Um—”

Beside him is the club’s back door, through which the fight spills. Ben curses, focusing his attention. Starting the engine, just as the thugs (devoted fans, as Hux had called them) fan out, landing on his bonnet and bleeding onto the paint, Ben reverses. The crowd parts for him, yelling obscenities and kicking his car as they go.

When they’re in the stream of main traffic, Ben rolls his shoulders. His eyes flick to his side mirror. The sirens flash blue and red and white. Two police cars, if he counts correctly, and an ambulance.

Fucking rock bands. Fucking Praetorian. The first gig, they’d smashed the equipment, and led to Hux docking everyone’s salary to pay for the damages. And this gig, they decide to turn the whole thing into a rally of some kind, riling up their fans until a fever pitch spread among all of them. By the time Phasma thought to step in, it was too late. The mosh pit the fans had set up at the beginning of the night had become more of a mob.

Ben was beginning to think some of them hadn’t even been fans at all, but just guys spoiling for a fight.

“Look out!”

Ben blinks, adjusting his lane position. A cab honks their obnoxious thanks in return.

“Would you mind not killing my boyfriend, thanks,” Tico says from the back. Finn chuckles, then winces, but Ben hears him mutter _good one_ to his girlfriend anyway.

It’s a long silence, filled by sounds of traffic and arguments and hailing for cabs. Ben flicks his gaze towards the rear view. The Tico girl kisses Finn’s temple.

“Where’d you live?”

She seems like she’s going to argue, still blaming him for the fight breaking out in the first place (which is fair), but she relents, giving the directions.

Getting into the lane, Ben taps out a rhythm with his fingertips onto his steering wheel, focusing on the traffic ahead.

“Thanks,” he remembers to say after about thirty seconds of awkward silence.

He’s so aware of Rey.

It’s been two months, and she’s still as present in his mind as she is now, as she was when they first met.

 _“Coconut water. What’d you think about it?”_ he’d said like a dumbass, adding on the question because he remembered he was supposed to make conversation. His grip tightens on the steering wheel as he fights back a blush just thinking about it.

She’d looked blankly at him, as blankly as she stares out of the window now, avoiding his eyes, and he’d stiffened in response.

 _“It’s supposed to have major health benefits,”_ he’d said defensively, fighting the urge to trip over his tongue to say how it was the shade of her eyes that had made him approach her and how, wow, you’re almost obnoxiously pretty.

Phasma had insisted that night that he mingled and _“do what actual bar owners do”_ , instead of glowering at the security cameras in the office and exchanging jibes with Hux.

Somehow, perhaps by God being kind to him for once out of sheer embarrassment for him, he’d ended up backing her into a bathroom stall and pressing her up against the bathroom wall, pressing himself into her and thinking briefly for a moment he’d found manna from heaven, and taking her home. Where’d she managed to give him a hand job and he’d managed to go down on her before she’d curled sleepily into his chest, and he’d had the first good night’s sleep he’d had in a long while.

On autopilot, he drives according to Tico’s directions and eventually pulls up outside their apartment building. It’s on the edge of the underworld, with rotted developments standing next to ones that have lasted decades.

“Thanks for the ride,” Tico says, pushing open the door.

“Least I could do. Hey, Finn—?”

“Boss?”

He hates it when people call him that, and Ben can’t help but realise, as Finn smiles past the tissues, that Finn is still doing it on purpose.

“Hux will insist that – pay is docked, for the damage.”

Finn nods, with a sigh coming into his voice. “Sure thing. Boss.”

He slams the door behind him. As Ben switches on the ignition, there’s a rumble of rain in the sky. The air smells thickly of metal and wet heat.

Ben glances over Rey. She returns his gaze with a scowl. There’s the wound on her cheek, and she’s begun to bleed through her shirt.

He sighs and drives slowly into the underworld.

* * *

As he slips inside, the neon convenience store sign is pale on Ben Solo’s skin. It would be too easy to focus on his muscles. They’re barely contained inside his plain burnout shirt. It’s the line of his neck, however, that she can’t help but focus on as he studies a freezer, leaning over it.

She doesn’t quite get him, and that’s what is exciting about him. She knows she should hate him, knew that from the moment he opened his mouth and used coconut water as an opening gambit, but somehow, his eyes softened where his mouth hardened into a line. The whole of his body spoke of defence, of _you just don’t get it_ , but his eyes spoke of immediate regret.

He looked like he’d be more comfortable in a library rather than running a bar.

He was, to tell the truth to herself, endearing.

Through the car window, wincing as she presses herself into the seat of the Firebird and thus her wound on the seat, she sees his head glancing over his shoulder, back at her.

She moves too slow and doesn’t miss the flick of a smile that appears on his full mouth.

Distantly, there’s the sound of house music, overshadowed by the heavy patter of sudden summer rain.

The door to the Firebird opens. Ben has a grimace, a frown, etched on his face. The large bag of ice looks like a bag of crisps in his hands.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Just saw the damage those idiots did to the Falcon—”

“Falcon?”

“Uh, my car,” he says, trying to cover. His top-knot is limp from meeting rain, and tendrils of his hair frame his face. “My dad got this Firebird off my uncle, and my uncle liked giving nicknames to things.” He shrugs. “So, Falcon. Oh, ice. Here.”

“Thanks,” Rey replies, taking the offered bag of ice. She presses it to her cheek, hissing at the cold.

“Who’s Hux?” The question comes to her mind as the pain in her cheek slowly subsides, and another set of headlights crawl past the passenger window, making their way through the rain. Smokers gather underneath the shelter of the 7-11.

“He’s the bar’s manager. I leave the maths and accounts up to him,” he answers, and somehow that kind of honesty annoys her. She flicks her eyes up, withdrawing the ice from her cheek and watching him. As he did before, he taps out an irregular rhythm on the steering wheel.

“So, he’s going to dock Finn’s pay? For damages?”

He twitches at the implication in her voice. Keeping her focus on him, Rey presses the ice to her cheek.

“It’s standard procedure.”

“Oh my god.” She shifts in her seat, her eyes flicking to the windscreen. Idly she watches raindrops chase each other, bending the lights of the city until they’re just specks and streaks of colour. “If that is standard procedure, it’s fucking news to me.”

“Why do you care?” He doesn’t have the tone she assumes he might. It’s softer, more rounded. She frowns in realisation. He’s _curious_.

“I’m nobody,” she says dumbly.

“No, you’re not,” he replies, without hesitation. He says it with such authority that she feels inclined to believe him.

That inclination scares her, so she goes back to watching raindrops.

The silence grows. It widens, stretches until she can’t take it and she turns onto her side, dropping the ice into her lap. It’s slowly melting, and the water collects in her palm, staining her jeans.

“I care not just because it’s Finn, and he and Rose are the closest thing I have to an – actual family. Not just an uncle,” she spits, waving her hand, “who got me working in his shop as soon as I could see over a steering wheel. I care because… because it’s not fair. Finn got punched by a skinhead thug tonight, and all you could tell him was that he was going to get his pay cut.”

The silence returns, but instead of growing, it shrinks. It seems to shrink, closer and closer, until the rain is just white noise, and all she sees is the droplets on the window framing Ben Solo’s profile. Her thighs press together slightly. She digs her palm into her knee, hissing softly.

“Painful?” Ben asks, dropping his phone beside him on the seat.

On the screen flashes the name ‘Hux’, accompanied by an angry, buzzing hum.

“A little,” Rey answers, still staring at the phone screen like she’s never seen a phone before.

A text message, a series of them, appear in a scroll on Ben’s lock screen.

 _What the fuck do you mean fired?_ screams the first.

“Holy shit.”

“My mom says I have my dad’s brand of impulsive behaviour. Here,” Ben leans forward, giving her a whiff of his musk, which is oil and leather and old cigarettes. Somehow, it works. Somehow, she wants to bury herself in his chest and let go.

Of what, she’s not quite sure.

She’s possibly a little bit drunk.

Ben adjusts the ice pack against her cheek. It hits the right spot, and the pain in her cheek soothes. Rey sighs, tipping her head against the seat’s headrest.

Sunrise is coming soon, and it strikes her that she never managed to ask him for a job.

Rey giggles, the giggle becoming one single blasted laugh. Ben inclines his head towards her.

“I was…” She shakes her head softly. “I was going to ask you for a goddamn job tonight.”

Ben shrugs. “Well, I do have an opening for a bar manager. Finn could take that. I did look at his CV – he seems better suited to that kind of role. But then I’d be one bartender short.”

“You’re unsubtle, Solo.”

A smile creeps across his face, wolfish, and his look grows heated. He leans closer, flooding her nose with his scent again (her mouth waters – why did she run away from him? Why?) and presses his lips to her temple.

“And impulsive. Reckless too,” she adds.

“All very bad traits.”

Rey shrugs. “Good that I have them too then.”

As he starts the car again, Rey finds herself smiling.

“Hipster,” she mumbles.

“Mechanic,” he retorts.

Hipster and mechanic.

Not such a bad combination after all.


End file.
